GILBERT AND GEORGE

Jack Freak Pictures

November 19, 2009 – January 9, 2010

The terrible twosome return to Greece five years after their last show at the Bernier-Eliades Gallery and two years after their epic retrospective at the Tate Modern, the biggest solo exhibition in the history of the museum. We are pleased to present a selection of works from the latest and single largest body of work ever by Gilbert and George – the JACK FREAK PICTURES.

Over the past forty years Gilbert (b. England, 1942) and George (b. Dolomites, 1943) have challenged the themes of race, sex, death, fashion, religion, politics, nakedness and individuality with performance, film, photography and their now signature format of large-scale vibrantly colored photographic grids.

The art of Gilbert and George is "Art for All". In the belief that everything is potential subject-matter and that art embodies the ultimate self-sacrifice, they come to embody their own source of subject-matter. From the infamous ‘Living Sculptures’ of the late 60s onwards to the most recent Photo-Pieces in the 21st century, the
inseparable duo are instantly recognizable throughout their work as subject and object alike.

This much anticipated new series is perhaps the most aggressive and multifaceted yet in its content and form. According to the writer Michael Bracewell, “the JACK FREAK PICTURES are among the most iconic, philosophically astute and visually violent works that Gilbert and George have ever created.”

The archetypal motif of the monumental series is the red, white and blue of the Union Jack. This globally familiar and fetishised emblem stands at once for Pop-cultural cool, nationalist hooliganism and the tumultuous history of Great Britain. As the core pictorial element of the JACK FREAK PICTURES in an assemblage of old medals, flags, maps, street-scenes, signs and graffiti, the Union Flag is at once pompous, patriotic, ironic, ambiguous and absurd.

The extreme (ab)normality of modern living under a nation, is called into question and capsized, heralding a demonic celebration of the individual as beauty and as beast – of your average JACK as an actual FREAK. The dark setting of East London, where the duo have been living and working for the last four decades, is turned inside out to expose colorful and crazed esoteric landscapes, kaleidoscopically cut up and cloned to frame the infamous ‘gaze’ of Gilbert and George looking out from the world of JACK FREAK – a surreal world that’s more real than ever before.

The gallery remains open Tue- Fri, 10:30 – 20:00 and Sat, 12:00 – 16:00